'Any ideas?' asked Paet.
'I'll let you know,' she said.
Paet left soon after, leaving Sela and Ironfoot alone in the Shadows' Den. Ironfoot took Timha's notes and plans and books and spread them out in the mission room. The Unseelie had some very bright minds, but Ironfoot had one thing they didn't have. He had the map of Selafae.
He pored over these things for hours, carefully juxtaposing the plans for the Einswrath. Just as he had on his return to Queensbridge from Selafae, he became lost in his work, the rising sense of fear growing with every hour.
But Ironfoot's relationship to fear had changed in the intervening months. Fear was a driving force now, and it was something he could control. Whenever it got to be too much, he simply reached in and damped it down.
From time to time, Sela poked her head out of the den to see how he was doing, or to go collect another stack of briefs and dispatches from the analysts upstairs. Neither of them took a break, even for a moment. To stop would be to think about what had happened, and neither of them had any interest in that.
The two patterns from Ironfoot's dream upon the Arami net reappeared on paper in front of him, and he saw what these patterns had been all along. Not too surprisingly, one was the map, which he'd stared at so many times that he had the thing damn near memorized. The other was the overview from Timha's plans, which he'd examined just minutes before falling out of the sky in the burning yacht. The two were clearly connected, but something was very, very wrong.
It was morning before he realized what it was. He'd gone over everything a dozen times before he spotted it.
'Sela,' he said, coming into the Shadows' Den and falling into his desk chair. 'I believe I've worked it out.' He was smiling.
Sela had dozed off at her own desk, and now looked up.
'What? What have you worked out?'
'I've discovered exactly why the Unseelie thaumaturges were unable to construct an Einswrath weapon from the plans that Timha gave us.'
'Really?' said Sela.
'Yes,' said Ironfoot. His smile widened. 'Because they're fake.'
'What?'
'Oh, it's a very clever hoax, but that's all it is. Whoever dreamed it up, presumably the estimable Hy Pezho himself, spent a great deal of time composing plans for a massive feat of thaumaturgy that is brilliantly, extravagantly, and quite subtly, a total fraud.'
'What are you saying?' said Sela.
'There's no way these are the plans for the Einswrath,' said Ironfoot, standing. He stood and kicked his chair violently, where it struck the wall with a loud crash and shattered.
'You get it?' said Ironfoot, laughing. 'They're totally worthless! It was all for nothing! Silverdun died for nothing!'
Ironfoot continued to laugh, and at some point his laughter turned into tears. He sat down on the floor, crying. After a moment, Sela came and sat beside him, and they wept together.
An Easterner calls a lightsmith to his home to charge the witchlamps.'What color would you like them?' asks the Iightsmith.
'Oh, it don't make a lick o' difference,' says the Easterner. 'I'm blind, you see.'
'Then why do you need your lamps charged?' asks the lightsmith.
'Well, I hates to admit it,' says the Easterner,'but I'm afraid o' the dark.'
-Seelie joke
lack.
But not black. Black implied sight, seeing nothing. This was the lack of sight, lack of the knowledge of sight.
Things had been going well. Very well. He'd been as close as one could get to the fulfillment of his every dream. Everything had fallen into place just as he'd planned. And then at the moment of his ultimate victory, his triumphant revenge, like a beard-flicking villain in a mestina he was defeated utterly. The fel-ala, his own personal wraith of vengeance, had turned on him and devoured him, at the moment it ought to have devoured his nemesis. Yes, nemesis. After what he'd gone through as a result, he had a right to absolutes. He had a right to thoughts of revenge that passed understanding, that left logic and justice and morality far, far behind.
Where the fel-ala's tentacles had touched him, there was pain. A deep burning sensation that went beyond the
